North Korea's Sexism and Absurdity Are Progress for Its Propaganda, Sadly

Think of the meanest boy you knew in high school, and you basically have the gist of the emotional maturity that North Korea is running on right now. The country's propaganda campaign against its neighbors and America continues to ratchet up — it's now calling the brand-new president of South Korea a nagging "prostitute," and it may have released a video saying that the Untied States is among other things, a bird-less nation because we were so starved that we ate all of our avian friends. To be clear, women's rights — and basic human rights, really — are not a priority in Kim Jong-un's reign. But he was actually seen as a (relatively) progressive guy for North Korean women when he first took his father's supreme leadership, allowing women to legally wear pants for the first time in North Korean history. Keep that in mind when reading this diatribe today about their sworn enemy's first female president, Park Chung-hee:

"This frenzy kicked up by the South Korean warmongers is in no way irrelevant with the venomous swish of skirt made by the one who again occupies" the presidential Blue House, the North Korean spokesman said in a statement.

As the AP reports, "swish of the skirt" in Korean is closer to the trope of a nagging housewife. That insult, like Kim Jong-un's pants allowance, is actually a mild improvement of what North Korea and its state-run news agencies have been calling Park in the past. The AP explains:

Before she became president, a poem carried by the government Uriminzokkiri website described Park as a "dirty prostitute" and a "yushin prostitute" who pulls up her skirts in front of the United States. Park's father proclaimed what he called a "yushin constitution" in 1972 to prolong his dictatorship.

The other big North Korean slandering of the day is a new video, which suppossedly "explains" to North Koreans what life is like in the United States. As the Telegraph's Tim Stanley notes, the clip's authenticity still hasn't been verified. But according to the narrator on film, the propagandists want to make clear that Americans are tent-city dwellers who have eaten all the birds because our snow coffee can't fill our starving bellies and our heroin addictions have left us wanting:

News reports are focusing on the Germanwings pilot's possible depression, following a familiar script in the wake of mass killings. But the evidence shows violence is extremely rare among the mentally ill.